From the bench to the bedside gridwise: MediGRID

Short overview of current German grid activities in
diverse communities from Astrophysics to Climate Research focussing on the
Infrastructure and MediGRID:
(1) overall goals of MediGRID
(2) achieved pilot scenarios
(3) strategies on how to overcome the roadblocks in further dissemination of
medical grid computing:

What are the current applications fields for health grids in Germany
- Results from the pilot scenarios

How to overcome the main road blocks for the further dissemination
of health grids beyond basic research into healthcare and healthcare
industry

Today advances in scientific research as well
as clinical diagnostics and treatment are inevitably connected with
information solutions concerning computation power and information storage.
The needs for information technology are enormous and are in many cases the
limiting factor for new scientific results or clinical diagnostics and
treatment. At the same time huge computing and storage resources (e.g. ~109
personal computers in the private, public, and industrial domains) have been
installed which outweigh the resources at high-performance computing centers
~50-100 times and thus could contribute to the challenges mankind faces.
Both the Erasmus Computing Grid (ECG) and the MediGRID are two major working
resource-sharing entities at public funded organizations.
To build these infrastructures two e-social influences had to be overcome: i)
the sharing attitude and socialization of the individual, i.e. the
micro-sociality, and ii) the organization culture of the embedding
institution, i.e. the macro-sociality, as e.g. for the ECG the public funded
organizations. Operationally, an these factors were adressed by: i) the
participative integration of fundamental IT applications of major users, and
ii) the setup of an open and sustainable management structure.

Business cases for research and healthcare industry

The Services@MediGRID consortium tries to
close the gap between grid research and grid application in research and
healthcare related industry. Therefore new business models have to be
developed and evaluated as well in research as in industry settings. This
requires some additional software packages like accounting and provisioning
for the grid. We report first experiences and give an outlook on the
project.

Business models and sustainability of HealthGrid
solutions

In a satellite study to the MediGRID project
commissioned by the Telematics Platform Medical Research Networks (TMF),
Berlin, Germany, empirica performed a study on business cases and
sustainability of HealthGrid projects. The investigation of international
(mainly European) HealthGrid projects about business models and
sustainability uncovers a sceptical short term perspective with reasons for
more optimism in the longer run. Public involvement will be necessary and
should be expected to help sustain a useful infrastructure. The economic
case for HealthGrids is robust, which supports that claim and is also the
basis for optimism. The current process of shaping a more comprehensive
legal and regulatory foundation for the use of ICT in different application
fields, including medical and clinical research, health, and healthcare,
will lower the hurdles related to uncertainly about data protection and
security, IPR, and ethical issues. Usability and acceptability issues will
be more difficult to solve, yet are by no means unmanageable. Positive
examples referred to in this presentation show that efforts towards
addressing the most significant hurdle – the discrepancy between social
benefits and private incentives – are also underway. The fruits of these
efforts, however, will take a longer time to ripe and deliver the longed-for
sustainability of HealthGrids.